DailyJS: Sponsored Content

"Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver." -- Ayn Rand

I'm trying out an experiment on DailyJS called Sponsored Content where people offering commercial products can pay to get an article written and featured alongside the usual content we publish. That almost sounds like payola, so it's going to take care and tact to manage it.

My goals are fairly straightforward:

• Clearly distinguish between commercial products and services, and the usual (generally) open source things we cover
• Use the money to pay people to write for the site
• Generate money to free up my time so I can create more sites like DailyJS

Let's say you make an API or service that's relevant to JavaScript developers -- perhaps an error notification service, or supercharged CDN. By paying me to write about your service, you'll get a tutorial and prominent placement on the site. I see it more as a combination of genuinely useful content and advertising than simply yet more ads blasted into eyeballs.

The author of the first commercial product that we featured was extremely happy with the results: RoyalSlider: Tutorial and Code Review. It's partly a tutorial but also a code review, in which I pull the code apart to verify the quality. It turned out to hold muster, so I was more than happy to feature it on the site under the Sponsored Content Programme.